Parade a victim of its own success
The mood on Auckland’s famed party-and-poseurs strip, Ponsonby Rd, was a bit subdued this weekend.
Those not familiar with the place probably wouldn’t notice the difference – the bars and restaurants were still flush with millennials but a tinge of regret hung in the air nevertheless.
Usually at this time the barricades are up, bodies are oiled, glitter is flung, cheeks are covered with dark lipstick kisses. Politicians of all stripes walk the strip alongside folks in bondage, lurex, feathers, and towering platform heels. In five years, the Pride Parade had become a staple calendar date.
And now it’s gone – cancelled after a turbulent power struggle between factions in the organising committee late last year – and replaced by a march in a completely different part of the city.
You could say the parade was a victim of its own success. It had become a must-do on the Auckland events calendar, and a ‘‘mustsupport’’ for organisations that wanted to fly their queer-friendly credentials, or at least look like they truly had some.
Despite the years of support for the parade from flash corporates, this was not a corporate board. This was a bunch of volunteers with passion and drive but, I’m reliably told, little governance or board experience. And few societies like this one ever need face the kinds of challenges the Pride Board faced at the end of last year.
The board did some things absolutely right, scrapping fees and making membership free to remove barriers and allow access. But here’s where things could have been different: a sensibly phrased question – along the lines of ‘‘what are your suggestions for asking police and Corrections to work with us?’’ – and some reasonable time allowed to get to answers. That’s a pointless what-if now.
We don’t have a parade, but we do have a march that brings Auckland Pride some considerable way back to Pride’s roots. After a hiatus in 2019, will there be a Pride Parade in 2020? There are certainly rumblings that it will be back, but I’d suggest that the landscape might look quite different by next year.